Enter the website

“. . . I forget sometimes that we did, but we really believed. . . . there was a core passion that we all shared about actually changing the shape of political society.

“There’s no clear answer to me about why that happened . . . It’s not so simple as the DNC speech or the NYC Meetup flipping a switch. I don’t remember when I first started believing that it was possible—this restructuring of society . . . I like to think some of the tools I had a hand in were instrumental—Get Local and so on—but I can really imagine the Dean campaign without all of these things, except perhaps Meetup. What I can’t imagine is the Dean campaign without that conviction and belief, the culture of passionate, pragmatic work toward something much different and bigger than a candidate—the tool that made up the molecular structure of everything we did—in a deeply contentious, anxious environment, the one tool that held us all together, if barely.”

--Zephyr Teachout, in Chapter Five of Mousepads, Shoe Leather, and Hope: Lessons from the Dean Campaign for the Future of Internet Politics (2007)

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